The Tea Party, Conservatism, and the Constitution (Part 2): Hubris and Nemesis (I)

Kesler goes on in his speech to speak on the hubris of liberalism, which led to the Tea Party confirming itself as Obama’s devoted nemesis as well as the eventual exposing both Obamacare and modern-day liberalism of being the anti-American juggernauts that they are.

In a way, you can see how dangerous Obamacare is by noticing how it has brought out the worst in liberals — which is evident in how they have responded to the Tea Party. Liberal impatience with partisanship — that is, with people who oppose their plans — arises from the fact that in contemporary liberalism, there is no publicly acknowledged right of revolution. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but if one looks at some of the political theorists who were most important to modern or statist liberalism — Kant and Hegel in Germany, say, or Woodrow Wilson here in the United States — they are usually quite explicit in rejecting a right of revolution. In their view, a people always has in the long run the government it deserves. So there’s no right of the people to “abolish,” as the Declaration of Independence proclaims, the prevailing form of government and substitute a better one. In particular, there is no conceivable right to overturn contemporary liberalism itself; as liberals today are so fond of saying, there is no turning back the clock. To liberals the Tea Party appears, well, bonkers, precisely because it recalls the American Revolution, and in doing so implies that it might not be such a bad thing to have another revolution — or at least a second installment of the original — in order to roll back the bad government that is damaging both the safety and happiness of the American people.

This is the position, for instance, of Sam Tanenhaus, former editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of The Death of Conservatism. For Tanenhaus, conservatism is good insofar as it consolidates and preserves the liberal order. If conservatism turns revolutionary, i.e., attempts to roll back the liberal order, then it exceeds its commission — it goes off the reservation, so to speak — because liberalism stands for progress and progress is final. President Obama himself made this point a few years ago regarding national health care: “I am not the first president to take up this cause,” he said, “but I am determined to be the last.” But in fact, Obamacare’s strained and narrow victory in 2010 looked not so much inevitable as desperate. It passed by a party line vote, with rampant side deals to buy out the relevant interest groups, and against bitter resistance that has not gone away. Then came its disastrous rollout and its failure to meet any of its own targets for success. All of which suggests overextension and hubris on the part of liberalism, and in the wake of this hubris the Tea Party has confirmed itself as Obama’s, and Obamacare’s, devoted nemesis.

And these same liberals speak about the Tea Party in the same vein. Take for instance Alan Grayson (Congressman from Florida’s 9th Congressional District who was ousted from Congress during the Tea Party Election of 2010 but managed to worm his way back into Congress in 2012) who used a picture of a burning cross (which the Ku Klux Klan uses regularly against Blacks) in an email sent out to his supporters back in October, 2013, that compared the Tea Party to the KKK. He said that the ultimate Republican plan is “to bring about the End of Days. The Republican Party has become the largest suicide pact in history. And I hope they don’t take us with them.” Grayson also went on to say that there is “overwhelming evidence that the Tea Party is the home of bigotry and discrimination in America today, just as the KKK was for an earlier generation.”

Ever since 2009, the Tea Party has been at the front of the battle against Obamacare and the tax and spend policies that President Obama inflicts on America. What does the Tea Party need to maintain that edge? What has the Tea Party concluded from the battles against Obamacare? The answers will be given in the next article.